My morning’s ritualistic reading of the New York Times unexpectedly transported me to my childhood, thanks to “A Lunch that Tastes Like Nostalgia,” Alex Witchel’s lively account of a midday repast at Bergdorf Goodman’s. Her article pays homage to a fading rite—the department store lunch—and shuttled me back to the 1960s, when my Aunt Helen would occasionally take me with her on the bus to downtown Cleveland, where she had standing Saturday appointments at Higbee‘s hair salon with Miss Rose.

Higbee’s was one of the late, great urban department stores, where you could get your nails done, buy furniture, browse through books and greeting cards, try on dresses, and—oh yes—have lunch. Back in the day Cleveland boasted four such retail havens: Besides Higbee’s there was Halle’s, the May Company, and Sterling Lindner-Davis.

At the Higbee salon I idled away the time looking at fashion and movie magazines, with the promise of lunch afterwards at the terribly sophisticated Silver Grille, followed by a visit to the girls’ clothing department, where Aunt Helen always bought me a dress.

So comforting were my memories of lunch with Aunt Helen at the Silver Grille that when Cleveland Landmarks Press published The Silver Grille: Memories and Recipes a number of years ago, I snapped up a copy at Walden Books.

Higbee‘s and the other stores are gone, now. (So, for that matter, is Walden’s.) The sturdy but elegant Higbee building still stands kitty-corner to the landmark Terminal Tower on Public Square (flanked, on the tower’s other side, by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel). The grand old store is now home to the Horseshoe Casino, and has been for exactly one year to the day that I’m posting this. Fans of A Christmas Story, filmed primarily in Cleveland, will remember Higbee’s; its iconic display windows feature prominently in the film and contained Ralphie’s holy grail—the Red Ryder BB gun.

But I digress. Nostalgia will do that to you. Witchel’s article inspired more than this reverie: It compelled me to pull out my copy of the Silver Grille cookbook.

The first recipe I turned to, for Maurice Salad, had become a longstanding favorite of mine long after I outgrew the creamed chicken, which arrived in its own cardboard oven.

The book notes that Higbee’s Silver Grille began serving meals to little tykes in this cardboard oven in 1974, but my memory (which could be faulty) suggests that I opened the oven doors to retrieve my creamed chicken and whipped potatoes in the 1960s.

Large cities with renowned department stores invariably opened satellites in suburban shopping malls, and Higbee’s was no exception. I often ordered this salad when my mother and I ate at the “Attic” in the Elyria Higbee’s. It was a charming place, but it was no Silver Grille. There could only be one. Happily, the food—if not the name—was the same.

Lunch is ready!

The Silver Grille’s Maurice Salad with Classic Maurice DressingAdapted from The Silver Grille: Memories and Recipes. Used with permission.

Note: The Silver Grill made the original Maurice Dressing with a commercial base not currently available, according to the cookbook. A recipe former Silver Grill employee devised this recipe.

Two more things you should know:

1. James A. Toman, publisher of Cleveland Landmarks Press, tells me that they are reissuing all of the previously published Silver Grille recipes in a new volume, Recipes from the Silver Grille. The book is forthcoming sometime in late summer; be sure to check out the publisher’s website for details.

2. The Silver Grille underwent an award-winning restoration in 2002 by the Ritz-Carlton Cleveland. Although no longer a restaurant, the hotel uses the spacious tenth-floor room as a “function space,” according to Kelsey Williams, senior marketing and PR coördinator of the Ritz-Carlton, which is the venue’s exclusive caterer.

The Silver Grille today, in its current incarnation as an event venue of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Photo courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton.

Do you have department store lunch memories of your own? Share them in the comments section below!

At age 10, my bona fides in this regard were solid. I stood with the majority of young starstruck fans: My favorite Beatle was Paul, and my favorite Monkee—that made-for-TV music group modeled on the Fab Four—was Davy Jones. Yesterday Jones died of a heart attack at the age of 66 in Florida. When the ABC News tweet showed up in my Twitter feed, I stopped what I was doing and revised my priorities. My childhood crush had died, simultaneously taking with him a part of my childhood and giving it back to me. Respect must be paid.

As crushes go, mine was all-encompassing. There was something about that sweet smile, that guileless face, that thick glossy hair (I ask you: Was he not the Justin Bieber of his day?), that adorable British accent, that made me melt. So what if he was short? At 10 I was probably already as tall as he was. I didn’t care. And I knew that if only Davy Jones could meet me, he wouldn’t care either. (The conviction of a child’s crush is as immutable as, well, the sounds emanating from a transistor radio. I would fall asleep each night with mine tucked beneath my pillow, listening to CKLW, the AM rock station out of Windsor, Ontario, which cut a wide swath through the airwaves—I lived 25 miles outside of Cleveland.)

I watched each episode of The Monkees, saved my change to buy every issue of Tiger Beat featuring Davy on the cover, and even though I owned two Monkees albums, I still bought their singles on 45s. I’ve no idea now where the albums are, but in an orange 45-record case—buried somewhere in the attic or garage—and filed in careful alphabetical order, are “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You;” “Daydream Believer;” “I’m a Believer;” “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone (those three words tucked away in their parentheses fascinated me); “Last Train to Clarksville;” and “Pleasant Valley Sunday.”

Years pass. The Summer of Love in 1967 brings new sounds through my transistor. I start high school in 1970, and discover progressive rock. I no longer listen to CKLW; with the conviction of a music snob or dilettante, I keep my dial tuned to Cleveland’s WMMS. I distance myself from my obsession with The Monkees. They were for kids, and I had become a teenager, a young adult possessed of all the worldly wisdom you’d expect her to have, which is to say very little indeed.

Decades pass. I observe with detached interest (my musical tastes now running to classical and jazz) version 2.0 of several bands, including the Monkees. Aging rockers singing the old songs, God love ’em.

What strikes me now as I reflect on this, and on Davy Jones’ passing, is how vitally important some things become to us at certain times in our lives, how our fascination with them vanishes, and how, inevitably and with increasing frequency, mortality will bring us up short and return those things to us, as fresh and new as ever. We’ll never see Davy Jones flash that innocent grin again, or speak in that charming accent, but his music will live on. I reach for my iPhone and program Pandora to The Monkees station. Now the memories are flooding back. I can’t stop them, nor do I want to.

Had fashions in the late 1960s been otherwise, I would not have the strength of character that I possess today. I was born with complicated hair—thick, unmanageable, impossibly curly hair. And not the good kind of curly, either—the Andie McDowell/Julianna Margulies-kind of curly—just coarse and wiry and frizzy hair. This frizzled look would be en vogue today, when stylists spend considerable time crafting the look for runway models—a look that used to send me reeling in horror from the bathroom mirror. No, mine was the era of Carnaby Street, Twiggy, and the Summer of Love, and I had complicated hair. The fashion at the time was either cropped short, like the iconic pixie cut Vidal Sassoon created for Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, or long, sleek, and straight, like Jean Shrimpton or Julie Christie—all blondes, I might add. Relief came for a little dark-haired girl in the form of a beautiful brunette named Marlo Thomas, who, in the landmark television series That Girl, wore her straight glossy hair in a flip with bangs. The fact that Marlo was Italian and Lebanese, just like me, and had a father with whom I’d been photographed earlier in the decade, clinched the deal. She—that girl!—would be my role model. God knows, I needed one. I had complicated hair.

Credit: Marlo Thomas' Facebook page

“You have to suffer to be beautiful.”

That’s my godmother, “Aunt Fannie,” speaking. It’s 1968, and I’m in the seventh grade at St. Mary’s School in Elyria, Ohio. We’re having our class pictures taken in a few days, and my parents have driven me to her house to have my hair done.

Perhaps I should explain.

Aunt Fannie was a licensed beautician. (That’s what they called hair stylists in those days.) My godfather, Uncle Bill, was a gifted carpenter, and although he was not a professional contractor, he built their lovely ranch home in a rural part of Elyria from the ground up, and turned one of their basement rooms into a hair salon for my godmother. My father drove my mother there to have her hair done each week, and I was always in tow. With school-picture day looming, I begged and pleaded with my parents to let Aunt Fannie cut my hair so that I would have bangs and a flip, just like That Girl.

I finally wore them down. It wasn’t long before I was seated in the chair that swiveled around like a carnival ride. Aunt Fannie’s fingers wielded the silver scissors like some magician’s wand—snip! snip! snip! I had been turned away from the mirror the entire time, and couldn’t wait to see my idol’s impeccable hairdo in place of my tangled Medusa mane. When she spun me around, I was shocked.

I looked awful.

None of us had really taken my thick frizz into account when calibrating the outcome of my longed-for flip hairdo with bangs. The flip flopped, and I looked like a Labradoodle.

I hesitate to say this, because you’ll think that I spent my entire childhood in tears, but I have to tell you that I cried. Not a full-throated cry—just a whimper, with a steady stream running down my cheeks.

“Isn’t–isn’t there anything you can do?” I asked my godmother, sniffling. Flat irons had not yet been invented. She thought a moment, then brightened.

“We can straighten it!”

My father, who had been watching television in the other room, walked by just in time to hear this. “Not if I have anything to say about it!” he thundered. “She has beautiful hair. You never should have cut it in the first place.”

“I can’t go around looking like this, Daddy.” I thought he should know where I stood on the matter.

The tension in the air was palpable. My parents exchanged words. Aunt Fannie busied herself by rearranging her hair clip drawer. I escaped upstairs to soothe my nerves with a tall glass of 7-Up. When I came back down, the charged atmosphere had eased. I’ll never know who convinced him—my mother or Aunt Fannie—but my father had backed down. Aunt Fannie was mixing the chemicals that would solve the crisis and turn me into “That Girl” for my school pictures.

“This stuff stinks!” I cried when she began stirring the mixture near me. And when she started combing the goop through my hair, my eyes began to water—and not from tears. “It burns!”

“You have to suffer to be beautiful,” she replied sagely.

I don’t remember how long I sat in that chair. It seemed like months. But I finally was directed to the shampoo bowl, and felt the cool relief of water soothe away the stinging, rotten-egg smell of the straightener. Aunt Fannie washed and conditioned my hair and combed it through. I was entranced! When I touched it, it felt smooth and sleek; I had never experienced such a sensation in relation to my own hair before. My head looked smaller, too. It wasn’t my hair anymore; it wasn’t me. It was better. New and improved, as the commercials used to say.

Aunt Fannie set my hair in rollers and sat me under the dryer, where I perused the latest movie magazines. When I was dry—cheeks red and hot from the heated air, rolled hair crisp to the touch—Aunt Fannie set me back in the swivel chair, where she began unpinning the rollers, vigorously brushing out my new hair.

It gleamed. It shined. I had never seen anything like it. She sprayed hairspray all over me—the air was thick with it. I sneezed and coughed. But I looked beautiful.